Editor's note: Daniel takes on the first-shooter approach to World War II and explains how the genre needs to explore other aspects of the war. As a Jew, I know that I'd be interested in a game where the player liberates one (or more) of the death camps, as my Uncle Mel did at Baden-Baden. -Jason

The video game industry has been producing games based on World War II for almost twice as long as the war itself lasted. Despite this, every time I see the war depicted in media other than video games, I see incredible stories that game designers have never even attempted to present in games.

We’re all tired of WWII games and want to move on, but in my opinion we crave something else for the wrong reasons.

The problem with many WWII games isn’t that too many exist -- it’s that too many focus on the same parts of the war.

Saving Private Ryan sparked the use of WWII as a setting in videogames in the modern sense; the film is an eye-opening look at the war. It showed the brutality of the war, and video games have been trying to capture this for more than a decade.

My first real experience with a WWII game was the Call of Duty 2 demo (I still think it's one of the best WWII games ever made). The intensity of that game shocked me. In a way it did capture a semblance of the war's brutality.

The problem came when every other game tried to do the same thing. They all focused on the same events, the same battles, and the same mechanics. You’ve probably stormed the beaches of Normandy and fought at Stalingrad several times.

We knew it was getting bad when games like Call of Duty 3 started pulling out parts of the war tangentially related to D-Day, such as the Canadian campaign through France. My main problem with the Resistance franchise is that its alternate 1951 setting makes it look like a cheap “WWII but not WWII” endeavor.

At this point everyone knew the setting was overdone. The aforementioned games franchises, along with others, started playing with it. Treyarch finally put the setting to bed with Call of Duty World at War, which focused on the final days of the war. People are ready to let WWII go, but I think that this is the wrong thing to do and the wrong time to do it.

If you check out enough of the conflict's history, you start to realize that WWII wasn’t just another conventional war in France, Germany, Russia, and North Africa. It was a period that was experienced by humans and communities on every level all over the world.

I found the movie Defiance to be an eye-opener; while set during World War II, it focused most of its time on conflict only tangentially related to the Germans. Most of that movie is actually Jewish and Russian civilian rebels fighting local police in the German-occupied Belarusian SSR.

There, the war's shown as a catalyst for preexisting social tensions to boil over as battles are fought in even the tiniest communities who never see the main Allied or Axis forces. The Germans as a conventional force don’t actually appear until the very end of Defiance, and they're met mainly with guerrilla tactics.

I’m not saying make a game about this very thing, but Defiance dug right into important facets of WWII that video games don’t even acknowledge. This is true of both the human parts of the war and of the combat-related parts of the conflict -- some of which would make for interesting games.

One of the big problems we have here is that to my knowledge, no WWII game has so much as even mentioned the Holocaust. There’s an article on The Escapist calling games out for this. I’m not just talking about the death camps either. Games have omitted virtually all mention of the plight of Jews or really, any civilians caught up in the war.

When you’re going through a bombed-out village or town, it's not just a collection of destroyed buildings. These are people’s homes -- representations of lives that were destroyed. The game you’re playing treats them as little more than shooting galleries whose original inhabitants might as well have never existed.

When it comes to actual combat, every WWII game seems to act as if the entire war was only experienced by uniformed Americans, British, Russians, Germans, and Japanese fighting conventional battles. Every time I see WWII depicted on the History Channel, I see stories that make gaming’s depictions look like a fallacy.

Defiance follows a group of partisans, which, from my understanding, were guerrilla groups of civilians who resisted Germans occupying their own lands all across Europe. Another recent movie depicting Partisans was Miracle at St. Anna -- which was about a platoon of African American infantry in Italy (another aspect of WWII barely mentioned in games).

The irregular kind of warfare fought by partisans and people like them is a usable concept that I don’t think I’ve seen in any game. The closest thing I’ve seen so far is the upcoming Saboteur, a game in which you perform espionage as a lone French resistance fighter. Otherwise, war in gaming has almost always been purely conventional, which is probably part of why WWII has grown boring.

Then there’s all the alternative stuff that went on in the Pacific.

One of the things World at War set out to do was paint the Pacific battle against the Japanese as a different kind of fight, and to an extent it did that. The Japanese were more prone to suicidal ambushes and guerrilla tactics. They also frequently fought to the last man. In the game you’d get a lot of guys rushing you disguised in grass and brush, but it disappointed me. One thing I really wanted to see was Iwo Jima, or at least some beachhead landings, in order to show just how different storming the beaches was in the Pacific.

The Japanese had a tendency to actually let the Americans walk right over the beaches and only begin attacking once they were inside and ready for ambushes or snipers. In the movie Flags of our Fathers, Iwo Jima is depicted as an antithesis to Normandy, as the Americans crept up the island wondering where the hell all the Japanese were.

I so wanted to see that in World at War. As a set piece in Call of Duty fashion, it would’ve made for a perfect contrast for gamers who’ve played Normandy a thousand times. Instead, they largely just turn the island fights into D-Day with guys shouting Japanese at you instead of German.

Another excellent example of WWII fighting that’s gone totally ignored in gaming is the ally-led guerrilla fighting that went on in the Pacific -- like at the Battle of Luzon in the Philippines. An U.S. Green Beret named Donald D. Blackburn advised and trained Filipino tribesmen -- headhunters by some accounts -- to perform guerilla and sabotage ops behind the scenes.

WWII is used so much in videogames probably because every war America has fought in since has been morally divisive and irregular in many ways. We see WWII as the last fully conventional war where we were the good guys fighting the bad guys. This has given game developers an excuse essentially put Nazis in the same role as aliens.

This week WWII in HD premieres on the History Channel, and it brings audiences the chronological course of events of that war in the perspective people saw it through at the time. It's revealing just how desperate WWII was for the Allies going into it and how much the Axis powers had devastated Europe and East Asia.

Unique points of view are allowed to give us an idea of how unprepared for war America initially seemed. Before we know that the Americans win, battles like Bloody Ridge at Guadalcanal are cast as frightening and dire situations as Marines on land were left behind totally isolated as their covering navies were stretched thin. One of the new series' advertisements even goes so far as to openly mock WWII games.

In light of all that, it seems somewhat shortsighted for games to only focus on the part of all this that involved shooting the uniformed bad guys in front of you. It's grown stale, and we’re ready to move on to something else (or at the very least do some kind of weird mutation of the same old thing). Doing this would be a disservice to a lot of the turmoil and sacrifice that really went on back then. We can’t just leave WWIII as a setting at that.